Design in biology and rational design in vaccinology: A conceptual analysis

This review discusses the philosophical foundations of what used to be called "the scientific method" and is nowadays often known as the scientific attitude. It used to be believed that scientific theories and methods aimed at the truth especially in the case of physics, chemistry and astronomy because these sciences were able to develop numerous scientific laws that made it possible to understand and predict many physical phenomena. The situation is different in the case of the biological sciences which deal with highly complex living organisms made up of huge numbers of constituents that undergo continuous dynamic processes; this leads to novel emergent properties in organisms that cannot be predicted because they are not present in the constituents before they have interacted with each other. This is one of the reasons why there are no universal scientific laws in biology. Furthermore, all scientific theories can only achieve a restricted level of predictive success because they remain valid only under the limited range of conditions that were used for establishing the theory' in the first place. Many theories that used to be accepted were subsequently shown to be false, demonstrating that scientific theories always remain tentative and can never be proven beyond and doubt. It is ironical that as scientists have finally accepted that approximate truths are perfectly adequate and that absolute truth is an illusion, a new irrational sociological phenomenon called Post-Truth conveyed by social media, the Internet and fake news has developed in the Western world that is convincing millions of people that truth simply does not exist. Misleading information is circulated with the intention to deceive and science denialism is promoted by denying the remarkable achievements of science and technology during the last centuries. Although the concept of intentional design is widely used to describe the methods that biologists use to make discoveries and inventions, it will be argued that the term is not appropriate for explaining the appearance of life on our planet nor for describing the scientific creativity of scientific investigators. The term rational for describing the development of new vaccines is also unjustified. Because the analysis of the COVID-19 pandemic requires contributions from biomedical and psycho-socioeconomic sciences, one scientific method alone would be insufficient for combatting the pandemic.